MappyDot

Wow, that was truly unexpected, the competition year on year has been harder and harder with some super polished and awesome projects out there. The Hackaday prizes are always a rollercoaster ride of emotions and they require so much work to meet the prize guidelines, so it's always a shame to see some really awesome projects not make it through. Don't lose focus though, keep going and get them out to the world!

It's been an awesome journey this past year for MappyDot. The biggest challenge has been actually getting to the point where there is a tangible thing people can actually purchase and use. That has honestly been the most rewarding part of all of this with some good feedback coming in.

A big thank you must go out to everyone that has supported the project so far as well as the judges!

There's a crazy couple of weeks ahead while preparations are made for Makerfaire Adelaide, but soon after that there will be a few announcements about upcoming developments.

On a final note, here's our video for the finals (apologies for the marketingish approach, the video was in the works for the Tindie store and Makerfaire and the deadline for finals after the Anything Goes announcement was really tight):

Just a sneak preview of a Mappydot piano that is being made up for Makerfaire Adelaide (and its own build guide for you to build one too). It is run by 8 MappyDots (on the dev breakout boards) and a Teensy 3.2 while using the awesome Teensy audio libraries to do all the work. The Mappyano has an integrated amplifier/speaker and power supply as well, so you just have to drive it with 5-12V and out comes all the noise you need to drive your housemates/spouse/fish crazy. There's 8 keys, but there will be some modifier buttons as well to change the note's output. There will also be USB out to allow for use as a midi device.

The notes have a striking distance threshold and an output velocity that controls the Attack-Decay-Sustain-Release of the note. So depending on how you hit the air, the notes change their tone.

Once everything is hooked up, there's some extra sections to restrict the viewing angle of each of the MappyDots which are held in with some small screws. This prevents excessive measurement overlap between each sensor:

I've written up a quick demo application for using the MappyDot as a standalone device.

The example shows the MappyDot connected to an I2C slave 7 segment display which we are using as a measurement readout badge for MakerFaire Adelaide:

There's a small trick to enabling the bootloader for this as the MappyDot is running in master mode during operation. During boot the MappyDot remains in I2C slave mode until the bootloader times out (1 second). So to load new firmware, you reset the MappyDot and run the firmware loading application in this time-frame (it's the same procedure as firmware recovery if you brick the firmware).

This procedure allows you to load any arbitrary code on the MappyDot. The repository has the demo code used for this example.

Edit: There's now a how to guide for you to work through to set this up.

I've been getting a demo up and running for Maker Faire with the mBot robit and MappyDots:

There is an extension for scratch which will be on the repo shortly, which allows you to connect a few MappyDots up to the mBot, to get it to drive around and avoid running into your legs or run away from your cat.

I will be at Maker Faire Adelaide this November 5th with a few hands on MappyDot demos, such as an air piano and a hand (The Force) controllable mBot. I'll be doing a road trip to Adelaide on the 2nd from Melbourne, so I'll snap a few pics along the way.

I have received a new batch of MappyDot PCBs from OSHPark as well with a smaller size to make it easier to assemble:

So from now until November I'll be making these up for sale at Maker Faire at a discounted price.

A small first batch of MappyDots has been unofficially soft launched on Friday as a way to get postage and packaging sorted out. There's still a few left on the Tindie store if you are interested in getting them early. There will be another larger batch available by the end of the week, so if you miss out there won't be too much delay.

There are two packaging options, one is a simple mailer sent as a letter for smaller orders without tracking, to try and make things as cheap as possible. The other is for larger orders or if you want tracking. Australia Post only allows tracking on parcels, which has a limit of 500grams for the cheapest option, so since the MappyDots are tiny and only weigh a few grams, I have thrown in a few Aussie sweets to fill the extra weight and provide additional cushioning :)

Sorting out customs forms and shipping has been interesting. When you create a waybill for a parcel on the AusPost website it creates a series of A5 customs documents for you to print. They require an A5 plastic sleeve to put these in, which is meant to be provided by the AusPost stores for free when you drop them off. Well it turns out the AusPost stores have no idea about this and don't actually stock them, nor do any of the major stationary or office supply stores. So after visiting 4 post stores I got them to contact the corporate center to find out how to actually do this. One store in Melbourne's CBD had them in stock so I took a trip in to grab a few.

When I got there they first said they didn't have them. I said they were just called about 20 minutes ago and to take another look. Low and behold, they did have them but then they wanted to charge me for them. Since I have already spoken to the corporate center about it all, I said firstly they are free and secondly they don't even have a stock code, so they have no way to bill me for them. A few minutes later the staff member finally gave up on the sales terminal and gave me a large handful and served the next customer.

Normally this isn't a problem because you fill out these forms by hand, rather than printing them. And they have an abundance of these handwritten forms. But it was interesting to see that our postage services really haven't caught up with international shipping and the internet in 2017.

So far the MappyDot has been shipped to the US, Hungary and Spain. Hopefully we can dot the entire map!

Here's a quick gesture recognition demo with multiple MappyDots feeding into a slow and dirty python visualisation script. The MappyDots are also showing that they work when their fields of view overlap as well as a PWM LED output (ignore the differing LED brightness on some of the Dots in the demo, they have different LEDs from different prototype batches). The threshold for the PWM is configurable and currently set to dim at 300mm.

For starters, the MappyDots are coming along. I'm just getting them tested and calibrated which is taking a bit longer than expected. Part of this is developing a programming, test and calibration jig to make it easier to lots at a time. I have also been delayed by a few personal reasons, but I hope to have some ready by Wednesday and then another batch next week. So stay tuned.

A few small changes have been added to the repo - https://github.com/MappyDot

The MappyDot Firmware is now up as is the Bootloader code. The MappyDot firmware is quite large, so adding new functionality can be tricky:

REM ################
REM Max .text Size 0x7C00 due to bootloader.
REM ################
avr-size.exe --format=Berkeley -x MappyDot.elf
           text       data        bss        dec        hex    filename
         0x72fa      0x122      0x19d      30137       75b9 MappyDot.elf

So we are using about 93% of the total flash space. Most of this is taken up by the VL53L0X APIs (even after shrinking and trimming them down a fair bit). You might be thinking, but why don't the Adafruit or Pololu Vl52L0X libraries have these size issues? This is because they don't have the calibration functions implemented, which take up a fair bit of space on their own.

The good news is, that to read from the MappyDot via an Arduino, you only require about 4KB of program space (most of that is the Wire libraries) and next to no data memory. On other platforms this can be substantially less than that. So it leaves room for the more important things, like programming up @Arsenijs' mould growth threshold detection algorithm.

The initial release of the firmware (which will release on the first batch of MappyDots) is missing the MappyDot measurement mode and I2C passthrough. This will be implemented at a later stage, but had be cut due to time constraints. You can still change to other modes though.

There's also a very simple Arduino I2C test application as well that can be used as a reference. It has a little menu you can use to test the MappyDot. Just press the character corresponding to the function you require.

The MappyDots are now made up. There's just a few firmware tweaks, firmware programming and calibration to go. All going well they will be for sale early next week.

That's a lotta dots!